“It’s not safe,” Mila explains. “And it won’t be for long. I’ve been thinking of a new way to get us out of here. Both of us. We must be patient. It will take some time to prepare.”
“Will we be with Father?” Felicia asks. Mila blinks. It’s the third time in the past week Felicia has asked about Selim. Mila can’t fault her for it. When she’d been at her most despondent, she’d indulged in hours of telling Felicia about Selim, a way of fooling herself into thinking that by talking about him, he would come back, give her some answers, some advice on how to survive, how to keep Felicia safe. She’d told Felicia countless stories of her handsome doctor father: the way he’d push his glasses up his nose, the way the corners of his mouth had crinkled when Mila first told him that she’d become pregnant within months of marriage—as if the strength of their love needed a physical manifestation—and later, after Felicia was born, the way he would make her laugh by counting her toes, by blowing kisses into her belly, by playing endless games of peek-a-boo. Felicia can recite these stories, along with the details of his face, as if recalling them from her own memory.
Mila has put so much hope into Selim’s return, it is understandable that her daughter would assume that any plan for their safety would involve him. But the odds of her husband being alive have begun to feel impossibly small, and Mila knows that the longer she clings to this fantasy, the more dangerous it becomes. It’s been two years of constant worry. Constant fear of the worst. Mila has had enough. She can’t do it any longer. She has to let him go, to take responsibility for herself and for Felicia. It will be less harrowing, she realizes, to mourn him than to worry incessantly about him. Until they are safe, she’s decided, she must believe he is dead. It is the only way to keep her wits about her.
But how can she tell this to Felicia? How can she explain to her almost-four-year-old daughter that she might never know her father? “You need to prepare her,” Nechuma has said over and over. “You can’t keep her hopes up; she’ll resent you for it.” Her mother is right. But Mila isn’t ready yet, for the conversation, for the heartbreak that will ensue. Instead, she will try a new tack. She will tell part of the truth. She reaches for Felicia’s hands, holds them in hers.
“I want so badly to believe your father will come back to us. But I—I don’t know where he is, love.”
Felicia shakes her head. “Something happened to him?”
“No. I don’t know. But what I do know is that if he is well, wherever he is, he’s thinking of you. Of us.” Mila manages a smile. Her voice is soft. “We will try to find him, I promise. It will be a lot easier to ask around once we’re outside the ghetto. But until then, we must think about what’s best for us. You and me. Okay?”
Felicia looks at the floor.
Mila sighs. She squats before Felicia, wraps her fingers gently around her upper arms, and waits for her to look up. When she does, there are tears in her eyes. “I know it’s awful, being alone all day,” Mila says quietly. “But you have to know it is for the best. You are safe here. Out there . . .” Mila looks to the door, shaking her head. “Do you understand?”
Felicia nods.
Mila glances again at her watch. She is late. She’ll need to jog to the workshop. She reminds Felicia about the bread in the pantry, about walking in her socks, about the place in the cabinet, the secret spot where she’s meant to hide and to stay perfectly still, like a statue, should anyone knock while Mila is at work.
“Good-bye, love,” Mila says, kissing Felicia on the cheek.
“Good-bye,” Felicia whispers.
Outside, Mila locks the door to the flat and closes her eyes for a moment, praying as she does every morning that the Germans won’t raid the flat while she’s gone, that she will return in nine hours to find her daughter right where she left her.
—
Felicia frowns. Her mind buzzes. Her father is out there somewhere, she is sure of it. He will come back to them. Her mother may not believe it, but she does. She wonders for the thousandth time what it will feel like to meet him, imagining him scooping her off her feet, magically easing her hunger, filling her up with happiness. Her mother had mentioned a way to get them out of the ghetto. Maybe this new idea of hers will lead them to her father. Felicia’s shoulders sink as she remembers the two plans before it. The mattress. The list. Both were horrifying. With each, she had ended up back where she started, and worse off for it. Her mother speaks often of waiting. Of being patient. She hates that word.
—
It takes Mila several weeks to gather what she needs for her plan to work: a pair of gloves, an old blanket, scissors, two needles, several lengths of black thread, two buttons, a handful of fabric scraps, and a newspaper. What she takes from the factory she tucks discreetly into her bra or under her waistband, keenly aware that the last worker who was searched and caught with a spool of thread in the pocket of his winter coat was murdered on the spot.
Every night, from the flat’s second-story window, she presses her nose to the glass and runs her gaze along the brick apartments lining the ghetto perimeter, studying each of the three gates at the main entrance on the corner of Wa?owa and Lubelska Streets—a wide arch for vehicles, flanked by two narrower openings for pedestrians. And every night it’s the same: The German wives arrive just before six, dressed in their sleek overcoats and felt caps. They stroll in through the vehicle gate and congregate at the ghetto’s cobblestoned entrance, waiting for their husbands, the ghetto guards, to be relieved from duty. Some cradle infants in their arms, others clasp the hands of small children. While the women mingle, the three hundred or so Jews returning from day labor camps outside the ghetto are herded back in through the two smaller pedestrian gates. At six o’clock sharp, the guards, along with their wives and children, disappear from beneath the arched vehicle entrance, and all three gates to the outside world are sealed shut, not to be reopened until morning.
Mila checks the time. Ten minutes until six. At the ghetto entrance, a little boy darts from his mother’s side to wrap his arms around the leg of one of the guards. Which of these strangers, she wonders, lives in her parents’ old home? Which of the wives bathes in her mother’s porcelain bathtub? Which of the children practices scales on their beloved Steinway? The thought of a Nazi family making themselves comfortable at 14 Warszawska makes her sick.
She watches as the ghetto gates swing closed. Six o’clock on the dot.
This time, Mila decides, her plan will work. It has to. She and Felicia will escape. And they’ll do it in plain daylight, for all of the goddamn guards to see.
—
It’s after curfew and the ghetto is quiet. Mila and her mother stand at their small kitchen table, their supplies laid neatly in front of them. A single candle burns for light. “Shame I left my patterns at the shop,” Nechuma says quietly, as she cuts a page of newspaper into the shape of the body of an overcoat. “You’ll have to dress warmly,” she adds. “We have nothing for lining.” Mila nods as she kneels to pin her mother’s makeshift pattern to the blanket she’s spread across the floor, snipping the wool carefully along the edges of the paper. She and Nechuma trade the scissors back and forth, repeating the process for the coat’s sleeves, lapels, collar, and pockets. And then, sitting on opposite sides of the table, they begin to sew.